With the rapid development of display technology in recent years, autostereoscopy is an important developing trend. An autostereoscopic display typically consists of an LCD panel and micro-optical components (e.g. parallax barrier and lenticular lens array). The LCD panel displays an image corresponding to a particular visual range on a corresponding group of pixels, or the LCD panel displays the images corresponding to different visual ranges at different moments. The role of a micro-optical component is to project the image corresponding to a particular visual range into a space corresponding to the particular visual range. Left and right eyes of a viewer see different images when the left and right eyes are respectively located at appropriate visual ranges, so the images are fused in the brain of the viewer and the viewer senses stereoscopic vision.
Referring to FIG. 1, FIG. 1 is a conventional switchable 2D/3D LCD. The switchable 2D/3D LCD 10 includes an LCD panel 12 and a switching 2D/3D layer 14. The LCD panel 12 includes a thin film transistor (TFT) array substrate, liquid crystals, and a color filter substrate, all of which are familiar to those skilled in the art. Thus, no further details will be provided herein. The switching 2D/3D layer 14 includes a lower substrate 142, liquid crystal (LC) molecules 144, an upper substrate 146, a lower electrode 1422, and an upper electrode 1462. The upper electrode 1462 has a plurality of striped gaps or “slits”. The principle thereof is described as follows. When applying a voltage, an electric field generated between the upper and lower substrates is non-uniform, and the LC molecules 144 shown in FIG. 1 are arranged along the electric field. Under this condition, for the image within the region, the switching 2D/3D layer 14 is equivalent to a lenticular lens, thereby achieving the effect of a 3D display. Moreover, when no voltage is applied, all the LC molecules 144 are vertically arranged, so that the image within the region can completely pass therethrough, thereby forming the effect of a 2D display of the original LCD panel 12.
However, the above-mentioned switching 2D/3D layer 14 requires a sufficient space between the upper and lower substrates in order to achieve a horizontal distribution of the electric field, so that the LC molecules 144 can be arranged as shown in FIG. 1. Therefore, a cell gap (e.g. about 20 um) between the both substrates of the conventional switching 2D/3D layer 14 can not be effectively reduced, as a result, the thickness of the conventional switching 2D/3D layer 14 is too thick and fails to meet the current trend of a compact size for the display.